The Future of the Humanities and the Specter of Antisemitism
According to the sages, God begins with one and not two, so that no one can say to another, “My side of the family is better than your side of the family”: there is only one side of the human family, with all the ethical obligations that come to bear in being part of the human family.
The Thin Crust of Civilization
The ability to see patterns is predictive of a strong belief in them, which can easily become a faith in the unseen workings of power.
The People’s Choice
The fatal weakness in social contract theories is that no one remembers ever making such a contract.
Expertise and Education
If one is willing to dwell on the difficulty, to be unsettled and challenged by it, one can develop a flexibility, a stamina, an imagination of thought.
Can the Humanities Flourish in Prison?
After a Shakespeare performance class in prison, it is about going to bed with, not sugar plums dancing in your head, but with an iambic rhythm that echoes through the night against the blare of a loudspeaker that rarely quietens amidst the bright lights outside your cell that never dim.
The Art of Conversation and the Revival of the Humanities
Montaigne’s comparative method encourages a complex mixture of appreciation of the many ways human beings live their lives, modesty about one’s dispositions and accomplishments, and the free but unpresumptuous exercise of individual judgment about the whole.
Rage against the University Machine
As far back as 62 BC, the Roman statesman, philosopher, and orator Cicero had announced that the studia humanitatis (“the studies of humanity”) were valuable because they instilled the crucial quality of humanitas (“benevolence,” “kindliness,” “humaneness”) in their devotees.
Form Fatigue
For the Yup’ik of Alaska, objects and human experiences constituted a complex and unified worldview inextricably weaving together the material, spiritual, and personal.
Dark Posthumanism and the Novel
What updates are required of the novel — a technology allegedly designed as a vehicle of liberal humanism — in the era of dark posthumanism?
Insider Exile
Melville’s narrator is someone whose secular critique is just strong enough to needle the professional class but too weak to do more than lament the plight of labor.
A New Horizon for the Study of the Arts and Humanities
The original work will not change and does not have to change in order to maintain its power, whereas the translation needs to be revitalized as the cultural and social standards and energies of each century change.
From STEM to STEAM
Science fiction has the benefits of both worlds—those of sciences and humanities, and its popularity among the reading public is the consequence of both technological advancement and the innate drives of the human desire to control one’s world and destiny in the postmodern and posthuman age of media and telecommunications.
The Flash Mob, A Novel Art Form
Just as historians usefully identity precedents for monochrome or still life painting, so we can construct a pre-history for the flash mob. In nineteenth-century Italian opera’s crowd scenes and in numerous dancing scenes in Hollywood films, you see music animating urban life. Suddenly the crowd is brought together by a song.
Evelyn Longman’s Genius of Electricity
Longman’s unusual choice to personify victory as an exuberant athlete instead of the traditional winged female figure exemplifies one key to her success: her ability to capture an institution’s message in a novel visual form.
Lightness, Panache, and Glistening Sonorities
Keeley’s music is genial and filled with lightness and panache… While Carl’s work is post-impressionistic, and about space and time, it utilizes materials in a most sophisticated and, dare one say, classical way.
Philokleon Goes Viral
Aristophanes scholar Matthew C. Farmer has suggested that the Trump campaign slogan “Make American Great Again” finds parallels in several passages in Wasps in which supporters of Kleon express a nostalgic longing for the “good old days” of the Athenian past.
The Bitter Sweetness of Life
For the classical composer, the aural idea is transformed and finalized in the process of composition, but the jazz improviser is involved in finding the idea in the process of its birth.
